The United States Is Now in a Very Dark Place

Posted Friday at 12:00 PM5 days

The United States is experiencing a phenomenon as fascinating as it is unsettling: one of the most advanced economies on the planet, home to some of the world’s finest universities and research centers, has fallen prey to a collective delusion dragging it decades backward in public health, environmental policy, science, energy and technology.

The trigger for this piece is an impressive Washington Post article analyzing the devastating floods in Texas over the Fourth of July, which killed at least a hundred people — many of them children — stunning local authorities with their speed and ferocity. The core of the article isn’t just the climate tragedy itself, but the context in which it unfolds: a country where the president, Donald Trump, aims to eliminate the entire federal budget for climate and meteorological research. Zero dollars. None. As well as being an idiot, he thinks that ignoring the problem will make it vanish…

This dismantling of scientific knowledge isn’t random or anecdotal. It’s accompanied by shuttering weather stations, eliminating key positions in the National Weather Service (even in vulnerable areas like Kerr County itself), and the systematic gutting of agencies like NOAA, the backbone of U.S. climate and oceanic forecasting. A direct attack on science, on information, and ultimately, on public safety. And by the way, in China they are going in the exact opposite direction: more research, more AI, more prevention, less deaths…

But the regression isn’t limited to climate. In public health, the picture is just as grim. The United States is suffering its worst measles outbreak in decades, with cases surpassing 500 in Texas and rising in Kansas and other states. The culprit? Anti-vaccine rhetoric that has gone from the fringes of conspiracy theory to the heart of public policy, now championed by figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose health department has gone so far as to cancel subscriptions to scientific journals like Nature, dismissing them as “junk science” — when the only junk here is the brains of these charlatans.

The same Kennedy administration is also pushing to ban fluoride supplements in water and for children, a decision rooted in radical pseudoscientific misinformation. Moves like this are part of a broader trend of systematic assaults on evidence-based science and policy — a disturbing return to institutionalized ignorance.

On the environmental front, Trump used his first 100 days to roll back dozens of policies: scrapping anti-pollution regulations, incentivizing gas-guzzlers over electric vehicles, weakening safeguards for national parks, and axing energy efficiency standards for appliances.

What’s truly baffling isn’t just that a government would propose such destructive measures — authoritarian populism is nothing new — but that millions of people blindly defend it. That in the 21st century, with all the world’s knowledge at their fingertips, a significant portion of the US population rejects science, embraces climate denialism, shuns vaccines and actively votes to dismantle the very institutions upholding their quality of life.

How to explain this backslide? How does a country that invented the internet, won the space race and pioneered mRNA vaccines now march toward a self-inflicted dystopia where knowledge is censored and ignorance is institutionalized?

The answer likely lies in extreme tribalism, polarization fueled by algorithms, media echo chambers and systematic disinformation. But there’s also a deeper emotional component: a rejection of change, progress, and the modern world — masked as freedom. Not freedom as rational emancipation, but as a childish defiance of anything that means change.

The consequences of this are all too real: more disease, more deaths, more climate disasters, less economic competitiveness. A country that, instead of leading the future, chooses to retreat into an imaginary past where everything was supposedly “better” — simply because no one questioned it — led by a blowhard who represents very powerful vested interests.

As Harvard climatologist Daniel Schrag put it this week: “It’s insane for a government to impose its ideology on basic science.” Indeed, it is. But that’s exactly what’s happening. Populism as democracy’s cancer. And there’s no sign it’ll stop soon — nor that other nations will learn from the obvious consequences of electing certain people to power.

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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.

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